10/22/2012

Stories, like the universe, are born of conflict. Electrons combine and collide, energy is born, KA-BOOM. Characters shout or sexualize, murder or meddle, KA-BOOM. As readers, we yearn for the KA-BOOMy climax. We lose ourselves in 800-page novels, needing to know what happens next. That’s narrative. Sometimes a conflict is born off the page, between…

07/30/2012

Consider broadly the painted portrait: A torso and face in oils on canvas. A grayish greeny black mixture of nothing-space for background. This is the classical portrait, the Rembrandt or Van Eyck, the Gilbert Stuart. The face floats without context in order to capture the portrayed person without bias. Now consider broadly the photographic portrait:…

07/02/2012

All show, no tell. That’s the best way I can think to describe Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s work. Terrence Malick adapting Beckett. Extreme minimalism. Delicate maximalism. Strange ballet on the page. I’m recommending Reticence here, but all show, no tell could easily be said of the Parisian Belgian’s work as a whole. Reticence, published in France in…

05/22/2012

Here’s a moment that hit me early, from the end of an essay called “On Snooping”: “I can accept that all I’ve ever wanted is not very special — all I’ve ever wanted, like most people, is proof of love.” Chloe Caldwell’s debut, Legs Get Led Astray, is exactly that — a proof of love.…

03/08/2012

When I was a kid, my dad and his brother and his brother’s sons and I would go fishing for trout a lot. We’d go out to a lake in Eastern Washington. We’d catch a lot, throw back a lot. Keep a few to barbecue. We used a lot of charcoal. My dad and his…

12/08/2011

Through college and some few years after, I regularly wrote music reviews. This took me to concerts 2-4 nights a week, and I could rely on receipt of a couple promo CDs each day. Having absorbed that volume of music means that, even now, any record or live show is diluted, watered-down. It takes something…